Improved Configurable Product – innovative way to work with configurable products in Magento!
We are happy to announce a massive update for our Improved Configurable Product Magento 1.x extension – the first extension which changes the way how configurable products work in Magento. Every new feature of the module has been requested by our customers and is based on a deep analysis of a modern E-Commerce market including SEO and various advertising strategies.
Download / Buy Improved Configurable Product Magento Extension
Download / Buy Improved Configurable Product Magento 2 Extension
We’ve decided to provide other Magento 1 extensions for free, so you can get them out of charge here:
Table of contents
New Improved Configurable Product features:
Tier pricing for simple products with on the fly (Ajax) price update
Now, tier prices can be configured for each associated simple product, so the final price is calculated on the fly without page reload, which provides your customers with the ability to see final product prices before they add something to cart. This feature significantly decreases both bounce rate and cart abandonment rate compared to situations when customers see final product prices only on a cart page.
On the fly URL change for selected options
If a customer changes options on a configurable product page, URL in the browser is automatically changed to a direct link for the selected product configuration. It is extremely useful when a customer wants to save selected product configuration for future processing. As for merchants, they get a simplified usage of individual options presets instead of copying URLs from admin for every simple product. It is only necessary to visit a configurable product page and collect all required option URLs for future usage in promotions, AdWords, or other marketing procedures, such as sending them straight to customers for further purchases!
Full support for the color swatch feature
Magento 1.9 offers the amazing native color swatches feature out-of-the-box which allows admins to add visual color indications for various options. Therefore, we’ve decided to include the support for this feature into Improved Configurable Product. As a result, pre-select and all other extension features work great with color swatches.
Default options for configurable product
Each simple product assigned to a configurable product can be set as a default option, which will be pre-selected when a customer visits the appropriate configurable product page via its default URL.
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We collect experience from dozens of Magento shop owners and buyers to provide better and most effective tools for selling online! Now you can get the full power of configurable products in Magento – point your customers to exactly selected option of a product, it makes a purchase much easier and reduces the steps before adding a product to cart. Create unlimited combinations of products with unique content and automatically generated URLs for better SEO and get more free organic traffic from Google.
Improved Configurable Products main features
- Preselect configurable product options by simple product URL
- Unique URL automatically or manually generated in admin for each configurable product pre-set (options combination)
- Display associated to configurable simple products on category page with unique URL and load configurable product page with preset options
- No redirects, java scripts, fully SEO friendly and improved behavior
IMPORTANT NOTICE: Before start using the extension, make sure you are able to provide at least one unique sentence for EACH variation/option description of you configurable product – this is not a huge work what should be done once but allows you to move your store SEO to true next level!
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Improved Configurable Product features details
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Pre-selected / pre-set options for configurable product
Customer spends a lot of time on selecting product options and variations, no more time spending on it! Adding a product without options to cart takes much less time than with options. When you have more than one product option – bounce rate grows up to 25%, you want to provide more options for customers but instead of that you just lose your sales! With Improved Configurable Product, your products with dozens of options can be added to cart with just one click! It’s incredibly useful for mobile e-commerce, as instead of scrolling down the page and selecting product options on a small screen, you’ll be provided with already desired options, so that you could simply add the product to cart with one click.
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Unique URL and page for each configurable product option when you can add unique content is an incredible innovative SEO improvement for the Magento core
Now you can start automatically effective link building strategy for your Magento shop with standard configurable products. Each associated simple product has its own unique URL and we use it to load configurable product with the pre-selected option according to the link. Each simple product / option can have its own unique description and can be displayed on category page, no more “Not visible individually” option. Another case – make simple products / options visible only for Google and your catalog search. Or if you don’t want all this benefits and you are not able to provide unique description for each option – simple product URL still can be used for target customers to pre-selected / pre-set options.
- Dynamically change product descriptions , title and image according to selected options after customer change selection
- No java script on page load, only after page is completely loaded for switch options. This means that search engines get a unique page for each your option / product
- Works based on default Magento configurable products, don’t require any changes if your products already exist – just make it visible for Search or Catalog and create a unique description for each option
- Visibility – “Search only” for Google and internal Magento search – don’t confuse customers with lot of same products on category page but get power of pre-select options for internal catalog search and Google SEO.
- No redirects – to release preselected options we don’t use redirects from associated simple product to configurable. Instead of that we modify Magento routing and load same configurable product with different pre-select for each simple product URL.
- No URL parameters – instead of hashed and GET requests you get automatical unique URL for each simple product / option, this URL also can be customised and changed for you needs
- Various combinations of configurable product options pre-set with unique URL
- Customer visit ready for one click buy product page with pre-selected options, store get better sales conversion
- Perfect solution for AdWords targeting to pre-selected configurable product options.
- Endless product combinations easy to create and sell
- Extremely useful for managing and selling configurable products with many options
- Reduce steps to add to cart – after visit product page even with dozens of options you customers can buy it with one click
- Demonstrate to your customers all possible product combinations
- Full HTML 5 support, works well and tested with most popular premium Magento templates (pre configured options for Ultimo premium theme)
- All changes and improvements have been done according to the best Magento coding practices
- Each page with pre-select options and unique URL can be cached with default Magento caching and also Full page cache (tested and works well with the best Magento full page cache extension – Lesti::FPC), less dynamical content and ajax, faster page load with more sales!
Improved Configurable Product Extension Manual
- Improved Configurable Product installation
- How it works – Intro & extension demo
- Extension settings
- How to find block id for dynamic change
- Simple products visibility settings
- Check if extension works correctly
- Examples of usage
Improved Configurable Product installation
To install Improved Configurable Product Magento extension:
- Unpack the content of extension archive to your Magento root folder
- Clean Magento cache (Magento admin -> System -> Cache management -> Flush Magento cache)
- Log out and login back to Magento admin panel
- Go to Magento admin -> System -> Configuration -> Firebear / Improved Configurable Product
Extension settings
Improved Configurable Product settings located in Magento admin -> System -> Configureation -> Improved Configurable Product. Here you can disable changes of each product attribute – description, short description, title or image. These settings work for both types of changes – during the first page, it loads with pre-selected (processed fully on backend) and dynamic changes after changing options (processed by java script dynamically).
We create a universal way to load attributes and make preselect on Magento core backend, but for dynamic values change after options changes we need to know specific HTML blocks id that fully depend on Magento template / theme that you use. As default values we take blocks id’s used on Base Magento theme, also on settings page after each id input you can see values for Magento > 1.9 default rdw theme and also world most popular Magento template – Ultimo.
How to find block id or class for dynamic attributes change
Dynamic attributes change means that when a customer changes a product option on product page – our extension dynamically loads and replaces the product image, descriptions and title. Each of those options can be enabled or disabled in the extension settings. Please note that each option enable/disable dynamic attributes change same as initial attributes change what happens when product loads with pre-selected options.
To find block id for each attribute you can use Firebug plugin for Firefox ) or Developer toolbar in Chrome browser ().
Here are examples of how to find product blocks id in Magento 1.9 default rwd theme.
For extension settings, it can be used HTML elements id’s (<div id=”some-id”> means for configuration we use “#some-id”) or css classes (<div class=”some-class”> means for configuration we use “.some-id”). Very important, do not miss the id (#) or class (.) symbols before actually name
Also Improved Configurable Product fully supports nested blocks, this means that in complicated HTML blocks you can use combinations of classes and id’s to find elements located inside of other elements – good example is a product description block in default rwd template (see details below.)
Product image
Product images block located at div with css class “product-img-box”, this means that for extensions configuration field “Product image block css class or id” you should use value “.product-img-box”. Important to notice that we don’t update image if simple product associated for option not have image – in that case Magento returns standard product image placeholder – we detect that and keep product image not updated.
Product title
Product title block located at div with css class “product-name”, this mean for extensions configuration field Product title/name block css class or id” you should use value “.product-name”.
Product description
Product description block located at div with css class “std” that is inside another div with class “tab-content”. “std” it’s a common and very often used standard Magento css class applied to blocks edited from admin, this means on one page can be more than one element with such class, that’s why we should specify in what exactly block we should update product description. For that we use combination of both classes of parent and child blocks like “.box-description .std” for “Product description block css class or id” extension option. You can use various combinations of child and parent classes and id to find correct element for each extension option.
Product short description
Product title block located at div with css class “short-description”, this means for extensions configuration field Product title/name block css class or id” you should use value “.short-description”.
Simple products visibility settings
Associated with configurable product, simple products can have different visibility. Each of them can be useful in specific cases of Improved Configurable Products usage.
- Not Visible Individually – used usually by default in Magento configurable products workflow, this means that simple product are not visible for Google and customers in catalog pages. Now, with Improved Configurable Product you can take URL of each associated simple product (Magento admin -> Catalog -> Manage products -> select product -> General -> URL) and use it to point customers directly to preselected options, by this URL, configurable product with pre-selected options will be loaded instead of simple product. It can be very useful for advertising and promotions because you can make exactly target for you traffic.
- Catalog – simple products are visible in products catalog for customers, in that case after clicking associated simple product – configurable product with pre-selected options will be loaded. In that is very important to take care of simple products – add an image and unique descriptions, have correct SEO title and URL. With correct usage you can have more unique pages in your store and very good crosslinking.
- Search – works exactly like “Not Visible Individually” option but simple products can be found by catalog search and that is more important for Google and other search engines, so all simple products in that case appear in sitemap. It can be useful if you create unique content for each simple product but you don’t want to display it on category pages.
- Catalog, Search – combinations of previous options Catalog & Search – simple products are visible as well as configurable products in catalog, catalog search and for search engines on sitemap.
Download / Buy Improved Configurable Product Magento Extension
Download / Buy Improved Configurable Product Magento 2 Extension